National Front Politician Says ‘Jewish Cabal’ Controls French Far-Right Party

(JTA) — A far-right lawmaker who got suspended from France’s National Front party for equating immigrants and Nazis said she was a victim of a “cabal” headed by a Jewish party member.

The conflict between the suspended senator Claudine Kauffmann and party spokesperson David Rachline erupted last week, further underscoring longstanding tensions and divisions within the nationalist party over Jews, Nazis, anti-Semitism and collaboration during the Holocaust.

Kauffmann, who on Oct. 1 became the first woman senator representing the National Front, was suspended two days later following an expose by the news site BuzFeed about her, detailing a multitude of provocative statements about Muslims on social networks.

In May, she posted on Facebook a color picture of brown-skinned men wearing blankets on a Paris sidewalk, juxtaposed with a black-and-white picture of Nazis wearing long Nazi-issued raincoats marching through the French capital.

“If the picture on the left isn’t called occupation,” she wrote of color picture, “then you tell me how it’s called,” she wrote.

Following her suspension, she said the suspension was not over the statements but a case of petty score-settling between politicians vying for party nominations.

“This cabal is very hard to survive especially when it’s coming from one’s own party,” Kaufmann told the news site Public Senat.